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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

(OT) One big problem of completely different languages sharing the same alphabet is the tendency to keep the spelling of names in the original language rather than convert it to reflect the way it may be read off in your own. For the life of me I can’t even guess how to pronounce this post’s title. (Or, when you have to call a guy whose last name - in English - is Chrząszcz, what do you do?)

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The Mnemonic (which I heard from Merlin Mann's podcast) is to approximate the pronounciation of "Csikszentmihalyi" as "Chick sent me, hi"

He and his name have Hungarian origins, and Hungarian words can be pronounced letter-by-letter, with emphasis on the first syllable. The main problems: what are the letters (some consist of multiple characters), and how are they pronounced.

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

- M: /m/

- i: /i/ approximately as in big

- h: /h/ as in “hi”

- á: /aː/ as in “father”

- ly: /j/ as in “yes”

- Cs: /tʃ/ as in “cheek”

- í: /iː/ as in “cheek”

- k: /k/ as in “cheek”

- sz: /s/ as in “scent” or “saint” (which means “szent” in Hungarian)

- e: /e/ as in “scent”

- n: /n/ as in “scent”

- t: /t/ as in “scent”

- mihály: as his first name

- i: /i/

Overall: /ˈmihaɪ ˈtʃiːksɛntmiˌhɑːji/ ≈ mihaay cheek-scent-mihaayi

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Mih%C3%A...

You can't convert all names to English anyway, because there are sounds in some languages that do not exist in English.

I am Danish, and have yet to hear anybody not a Dane pronounce Søren Kierkegaard[0] correct. I wouldn't have a clue how to rewrite the name so that it becomes more clear.

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Da-S%C3%...

But the pronunciation does not have to be correct. The way similar words (and names) are pronounced in a given language is a matter of that language alone. You cannot demand that a Chinese student must pronounce the name as a Dane would; you cannot require that a Russian student knows and uses the original spelling, either. So, Sorren Quirky Guard is the best I can do; my preference, of course, would be to have a more correct sounding "native" spelling that an English speaking person would be able to read.

I can wholeheartedly recommend languages which do not care about original spelling, either by having different alphabets (was it "Хрящ" you wanted to know? Easy-peasy in Cyrillic) or just imposing their own rules (e.g. Latvian: "Mihājs Čīksentmihāji"). Elsewhere, if you are e.g. learning German, you have to at least master German, English and French pronounciation with some bits of Latin grammar.

Proper pronunciation is, of course is a completely separate topic, because Chrząszcz, for instance, might end up sounding like “crotch” in English, even though in the original language it sounds different but uses phonemes that are difficult to approximate.

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